Richard Stallman and Medical at IWEEE 2010

We are very happy to have Richard Stallman at IWEEE 2010, the International Workshop on e-Health in Emerging Economies.

Richard will be at the same event where we will presenting Medical, the Universal Hospital and Health Information System. IWEEE brings together the main stakeholders (NGOs, Church, Academy, Multilateral organizations, Government and Industry ) to discuss the situation in developing countries and come to possible solutions. We will be promoting free software (like Medical ) to make a change in the lives of the people, doctors and institutions in emerging economies.

No doubt that Richard Stallman is one of the most important and influential people in the history of Free Software. He has developed tools that we've been using for decades, such as the excellent GCC ( GNU Compiler Collection , at the beginning, the GNU C Compiler).

But Richard Stallman is way more than that. He created the GNU Operating System, that together with the Linux kernel is in all GNU/Linux variants ; he created the GPL license, and most importantly, he has been figthing for decades for free software, making it a reality today, when not that long ago it was utopia.

There is no doubt on my mind that Richard Stallman will be a key player to help us who are working to introduce the free software philosophy to the healthcare industry. Health MUST be universal, and so should be the software that takes care of the patients. Free software in healthcare is a right that every doctor, hospital and patient should have access.

We are looking forward to sharing with Richard his experiences, views and opinions on how to keep introducing Free Software in the healthcare and schools in the developing world.

In this view, it's easy to look for patient's locations and status in the hospital. The colors visually differentiate the type of admissions.

We have also improve other sections, like vaccinations. Thanks to Andrew Gledhill (NHS) who proposed the addition of the vaccine lot and expiration date. Actually, the vaccine is integrated to the product, so all the production lot, traceability, and procurement is automated. Special controls for vaccine expiration dates have been put in place now.

I could write many pages, but it all comes down to one concept: ethics.
When I talk about Free Software, I talk about not only about freedom, but also community and good will from the software author. The latter probably is the most important one.
You write Free Software because you want to contribute to the community. It's an act of social activism. It's about sharing and helping out.
This April I got a mail from Chris Larsen, a doctor working in Rwanda, where he was asking OpenERP the scripts to upgrade to 6.x, since they needed to have the latest Medical version. The response he got was that the scripts were not publicly available anymore. If they wanted to upgrade, they would have to pay a support contract to OpenERP. This is the typical example of a vendor lock-in. They change the rules (even the license) and then the user becomestheir prisoner.
That very same day I started the implementation of GNU Health (previously called "medical") in the Tryton platform. B…